Meet our contacts for this month, Pastor Panya and his wife Ratrapee.
We will be serving them while we’re in the tribal villages up here in northern Thailand. Now I’ll be honest with you I try not to stereotype people, but I found myself doing it this morning. I had no idea this sweet and unassuming couple are real life warriors for Christ! Big time! Much more of risktakers than I have ever been for the Gospel.
Here’s just a small part of their story. Fourteen years ago they started going into these Karen (pronounced corinne) tribal villages around the Chaing Mai area of Thailand. Of course at the time none of the villagers were Christian. So as you can imagine Pastor Panya and his wife were never welcome. They were always met with opposition. Now this opposition was a gun in their face, a knife pointed at them and folks just flat out saying, “get out!”. I tell you, this is the point were I’d be packing it on up and headin’ on out! Not this warrior couple – they kept coming back! And they didn’t come back saying “hey let me tell you a story about Jesus.” They came back to BE Jesus. What I mean is they came back and noticed these villagers washed dishes, bathed and pooped all in the same creek. Obivously these folks had some sanitary issues going on. So Pastor Panya and Ratrapee saw the need and came back to fix it by building some MUCH NEEDED toilets. And they kept coming back! Next thing you know the pastor was taking sick villagers to the hospital – being there for them in sickness and in death. It was through their actions that these villagers finally asked, “Why are you doing this?” Pastor Panya replied, “Because Jesus told us to.” Naturally the villagers response was, “Who’s Jesus?” And that’s how it started. Today that village is 80 percent Christian.
I’m just so honored to serve these folks. We have two main projects we’ll be working on this month. One is to replace a ceiling in one of the churches in one village. The second one is to clear some land for the construction of a church in different village. I hear we’ll also get a chance to share our stories with high school kids. In all pastor Panya and Ratrapee serve six villages and I suspect we’ll get a chance to help out in each one of them.
Also wanted to let everyone know we made it to Chaing Mai early Monday morning. The plan is to leave out Tuesday for the mountains. You can notice an immediate difference in the humidity up here in the northern part of Thailand. I was actually able to get out and run without having to worry about a heat stroke! Anyway here are some pictures of the town.
